Merchants who conduct some or all of their business from physical locations have many options for a marketing/ad budget, including purchasing conventional media advertisements (e.g., print, TV, radio). Some of these conventional media outlets have proven methods for tracking the effectiveness of the ad campaigns. Furthermore, these media outlets are so well-established that merchants have a comfort level using them, even if they cannot directly measure their effectiveness. Tracking the effectiveness of web-based ad campaigns is a notoriously difficult task in the industry. Accordingly, merchants have little solid evidence to determine whether to even conduct such ad campaigns, or whether money spent on a campaign had a sufficiently positive return on investment to justify continued spending on the existing campaign or on a new campaign. Merchants who conduct some or all of their business from physical locations may be reluctant to conduct web-based ad campaigns due to the inability to gauge their effectiveness.
Accordingly, there is an unmet need to provide systems and methods for tracking the effectiveness of such web-based ad campaigns, particularly with respect to merchants who conduct some or all of their business from physical locations. The present invention fulfills such a need by providing systems and methods for attributing digital ads and the like to physical purchases.